


much of a muchness

by muined



Category: Alice In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll, Political RPF - Russian 20th c.
Genre: Ballet AU, Multi, pairings multivarious, stupid stupid ill-advised, the show must go on
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-13
Updated: 2019-12-13
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:08:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21774982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muined/pseuds/muined
Summary: “And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, ‘Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?’ and sometimes, ‘Do bats eat cats?’ for, you see, as she couldn’t answer either question, it didn’t much matter which way she put it.”A harlequinade.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 6





	much of a muchness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Schirach](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schirach/gifts).



> AU crack that got away from me and ran off in a sincere direction. My dear friend Schirach likes a girly Yezhov; I took this to its logical conclusion. I was trying here to strike a balance between the very silly premise of Soviet politicians as ballerinas and the direction it developed in: more...heartfelt, if gauche, and concerning the role of nonsense in terror and how this is conveyed in Carroll’s _Alice_ books. And powered by my love of ~backstage intrigue~ stories. And Yezhov/Malenkov, possibly the most hilarious ship.
> 
> What little there is to know about the ~setting: _Alice in Wonderland_ was first published in Russian as _Sonya in the Kingdom of Wonder_ ( _Соня въ царствѣ дива_ ) in 1879. Its publisher gave no indication that it was the translation of an English author’s work, Russifying Western names and concepts (the Duchess became a princess, etc.). Anyway, that date places this story at or around the turn of the century. Not that I tried for historical accuracy, either to the period in which the AU(?) takes place or Yezhov’s life and times; this is far, far from an exact allegory. But a little fun, I hope. As for the specifics of the allegory: “Heike” is the feminine version of “Heinrich.” Everyone else is exactly who you suspect they are.

Nikoleta Ivanovna wasn’t invited to the closing night party for _Coppelia_. She had hoped that she might be, although she _was_ only a relatively junior member of the corps, but she was content to climb up to her little room for an early beddown. She took her hair down, untied the satin bows at the backs of her calves and hung her pointe shoes from a hook on the plaster wall. Then she poured a shot of cognac for soreness, toasted the pinprick stars framed in her single tiny window, drank, splashed her face with stale water from the washbasin on the nightstand, stripped naked and crawled into her bed.

Nikoleta and her roommate Malanya shared this little room high above the stage, and stage left of the flyspace, clinging to the wall like an anchorite’s cell to the shear side of a mountain. Its ceiling was sloped with the curve of the theatre’s great dome. Nikoleta peeped from under her quilt and saw with satisfaction that everything, if worn or threadbare, was in its right place: her slippers hanging by their laces from a nail in the doorframe, programs from past productions tacked up on the walls. And opposite the bed was a limewood vanity cluttered with bottles. There were vain Malanya’s skin tinctures, there a phial of sal-volatile for anemic Nikoleta’s fainting spells, and a tin of Macassar oil that the two girls shared. In the vanity mirror, Nikoleta saw her own face on her pillow. With this, too, she was satisfied. She looked much younger than her age, and the scar at her jaw was so subtle that it wasn’t visible from across the room, let alone from the audience, when she had stage makeup on. Her eyebrows were a little thick, true, but from afar they added to her expressiveness, and at close range they were upstaged by her unusual eyes: pale, pellucid eyes like isinglass. Nikoleta had delicate skin, and indeed was covered head to toe in violet bruises at present, but these were hidden by her blanket and could be covered in stage makeup, too. She smiled at her reflection and blew out the tallow candle on the nightstand, prepared to sleep.

Only minutes later, though, Nikoleta heard Malanya’s heavy footfall on the stair. Malanya was fat for a ballerina and approaching fat generally, but was kept on by the company because she acted as a secretary for the Impresario, printing programs from a press in their room—and because she took direction so assiduously. She was by turns sycophantic to her seniors and the principals and haughty to her juniors in the corps, though she herself was confined to unstrenuous background roles as placid flowers or dryads. She was Nikoleta’s best friend in the world. They wore their hair pomaded identically, and often walked around backstage holding hands, drawing comparison once, from the internationally-minded Slava Scriabina, to the Papin sisters of France. Neither Nikoleta nor Malanya knew who these Frenchwomen were, and assumed they must be acrobats with a sister act. Slava told them their names Frenchified would be called Melanie and Colette, and these became their pet names for one another.

Nikoleta heard Malanya enter, lock the door behind her, and disrobe clumsily in the dark, tripping on the hem of her nightgown after she’d pulled it on. “Are you awake?” Malanya hissed.

“Yes,” Nikoleta replied, as Malanya wriggled into bed beside her.

“Oh, you’re naked. Anyway, I know what we’re putting on next!”

“The Impresario announced it already?”

“Not officially. Only after he’d gotten drunk. I can’t—hic!—remember the name, exactly.” Malanya’s breath smelt of champagne. “None of us had heard of it. Something ‘Kingdom’ something.”

“About royalty, then? Maybe we’ll be made princesses.”

“Scullery maids, more like.” Malanya was something of a pessimist. Nikoleta drew a circle on her bare arm. “Augh, you’re _cold_!”

“Not all of me,” Nikoleta said, and burrowed under the quilts, so better to draw Malanya’s nightgown up over her hips.

The theatre company to which Nikoleta and Malanya belonged operated on the principle of perpetual motion: they had only enough dancers for one ballet at a time, but rehearsal for the next ballet always began as soon as the last had wrapped. Their system of continuous production was unique in the world, the Impresario said. It was something to be proud of. In the morning, Nikoleta and Malanya with the rest of the company gathered before the main stage to hear the Impresario announce the new show. The principles sat in the front row of seats in their street clothes, while most of the corps members, in the second row, wore simple nankeen dresses, the uniform of the company’s dance school. The Impresario, who was fatherly and soft-spoken, walked onstage to applause, which he humbly brought to a close with a wave. He smiled and cleared his throat. 

“Our next production will be _Sonya in the Kingdom of Wonder_ ,” he said. “I adapted it myself from a children’s story; my son brought the book home, for me to read at bedtimes. I found it diverting and thought it would be good for the stage, so I threw together a score.” This amazed them. Where had he found the time? The Impresario seemed to be capable of anything, and to direct the whole world. “The story concerns a young lady, Sonya, who is transported to a strange, magical country.” He then read the dancers their parts from a list. There were few surprises, other than the couple of former corps girls that received principal roles, albeit minor ones: mild, well-liked Klimentina Yefremovna, called Clementine, would be the White Knight (there were to be several trouser roles, for the company was all-female) and stoic, harried, plain, put-upon Slava Scriabina the White Rabbit. Sonya, the heroine, was to be played by the most senior prima ballerina in the company, one Heike, an able but ugly girl with hair on her overlip. (She wouldn’t be Sonya if Mlle. Kostrikova, once the star of the theatre, had stayed on with the company instead of leaving a season ago.) Nikoleta, expecting no role but perhaps Live Flower No. 4, was made—in addition to a clown of sorts opposite Malanya in the second act—Heike’s understudy. The Impresario, who had kept his eyes on his list for every name he’d read, looked up and met Nikoleta’s gaze as he read hers. Nikoleta nearly wrent the skirt of her dress in twain.

“Now, onto a serious matter,” the Impresario said after he’d finished with the casting. “Recently I’ve heard tell of conduct unbecoming of young ladies who represent this theatre. Drinking to excess, drugging, immodesty. I have heard tell of students whoring themselves out in their rooms.” There was a collective gasp. “Or admitting strange men, at any rate,” the Impresario continued. “Furthermore, you may be aware of the recent dismissal of Mssr. Bronstein.” Bronstein, a fussy personage in pince-nez, usually read the cast lists at the top of new productions, but he hadn’t been seen for weeks. “In the interest of transparency, I believe all of you should know why exactly he left. In his position as casting director, Mssr. Bronstein accepted bribes in return for placing certain dancers in prominent roles. I expect this was the reason for the diminished quality of our last production.” Nikoleta looked around at her fellow dancers and saw that even the principles had their eyes fixed on the Impresario, and many their mouths open. “I have heard us called ‘third-rate.’ Of late people have said awful things about this house. They say our dancers are common, ugly when seen out of costume. They call this a den of sin.” He’d said all of this—news to Nikoleta and her peers—with little affect, as was his way. “We cannot allow this theatre to be dogged with rumors of corruption and iniquity. I am relying on all of you to help me to recover our reputation; I want all of you to be vigilant. If these are only rumors, they must be stemmed at source. But I am inclined to think there is some truth to them. Let Mssr. Bronstein serve as an example to those who think they can get away with exploiting their coevals.” Here the Impresario smiled warmly. “I have very high hopes for this run.”

The girls filed out of the theatre to return to their doings before rehearsal began in earnest, in the evening. Each moved as through water, in a state of mild shock. “Well, that came out of nowhere,” Nikitochka remarked, before the group dispersed. As she climbed the stair, Nikoleta wondered which dancers had bought their roles in _Coppelia_. Back in the little room over the stage, Malanya mended a split leotard in preparation for rehearsal while Nikoleta jumped up and down on the bed, pondering.

“Remind me, Colette, did the Impresario mention anything about the score’s composer?” asked Malanya.

“He composed it himself,” Nikoleta remembered.

“Did he? Has he composed before?”

Nikoleta thought. “I’m sure he has sometime.” Usually (for all the ballets in which she’d performed) the dance school’s chorus-mistress Rosenfeld had handled the music, transposing the parts for instruments the company’s small pit orchestra lacked.

“And what about the choreography? He didn’t mention Mme. Radomyslskaya.”

“Did you see her at the party?”

“No. Nor Mme. Rosenfeld. Oh, speaking of absences, did you hear about Mlle. Kostrikova?” Malanya asked.

“What about her?”

“She left because she was _with child!_ Anastasia told me.”

“You can’t believe her,” Nikoleta said. “How would she know?” But it would make sense. She remembered the Impresario’s warning against gossip, and changed the subject: “But my being an understudy. It has to be a sign, Malashka, don’t you think? He’s finally taken notice of me!” For Nikoleta was irretrievably in love with the Impresario, had been ever since he’d picked her for his company from her troupe of traveling folk dancers.

“Ye—es, I’m sure he has,” Malanya said distractedly.

“I would die for him, Melanie.”

“Yes, yes. Can you bite this thread for me?”

Nikoleta jumped off of the bed, looped the thread behind one of her canines, and savaged it in a love-fury, to demonstrate her devotion. Then, with excess passion still to burn away, she flew into Melanie’s lap, not caring that the errant needle pricked her thigh, and threw her arms around her fellow ingenue, licking the fiddlehead curve of her ear. 

“Colette, I—oh, alright,” Malanya whimpered. So the two girls fell to kissing.

> _Nurse! Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyæna, and you’re a bone!_

Rehearsal began. Nikoleta, who showed up to every rehearsal and ardently watched scenes she wasn’t in from the audience, gained a sense of the ballet’s plot: after ingesting a potion, Sonya shrunk and unintentionally frightened a Mouse, played by Nikolina (not to be confused with Nikoleta, and she never was, despite the facts that both were small and they shared a patronymic), a much-beloved young principal, with talk of the cat she owned in her own world. Onstage, this exchange was represented by Heike advancing across the boards and Nikolina retreating. Sonya was then welcomed into the underground kingdom by a Dodo bird, the nominal head of state, or so he thought. This comic part was played by Mikhaila Ivanovna, a very senior principal who was aging out of her position. The Impresario did her a great kindness by employing her for another season. He was generous in all things, Nikoleta thought. That was one of the reasons why she loved him.

The Princess of Spades that Sonya met early in the ballet, who had not to dance but only to sit in a wicker chair, was played by the Impresario’s dark, quiet young wife, who was not a dancer. The Impresario’s infant son played the infant she was to mime beating. She approached this task awkwardly, as she did the task of scolding Sonya. Though the Impresario’s wife wasn’t an ugly woman, Nikoleta in her jealousy saw her as such and was pleased that she’d been given such an unattractive role. About her feet dangled a marionette, the Cheshire Cat. When the Cat met Sonya in the woods in the next scene, the knee-high marionette was replaced by a great grey galumphing puppet like a Chinese dragon. The effect of the Cat’s yellow eyes and smile hanging disembodied in the darkness of the dimmed stage was achieved through the use of powdered sodium, which was burnt in glass sconces held on poles by the creature’s puppeteers. When the Princess’s suckling infant transformed in Sonya’s arms into a suckling pig, the Cheshire Cat said: “I thought he would.”

Sonya met also a caterpillar, a hatmaker called Ilyushka, and his friend, another rabbit, all of whom told her riddles. At the end of the first act she was summoned to the court of the Queen of Hearts, where she defended an accused Knave. The second act was chess-themed, with a Red Queen and a White. Each act ended with the Kingdom of Wonder collapsing around Sonya, as she woke up from her dream, as if the concatenated nonsense piled too high and could no longer support itself. The ballet would be a series of _divertissements_ , sketches, if not for the connecting thread of Sonya as noble investigatrix, pointing out untruths in order to disassemble evil regimes. Nikoleta loved _Sonya_ , not only because the Impresario had hewn it himself, but for its message and for the slapstick through which that message was conveyed: something was always toppling.

Nikoleta and Malanya played a set of twins, and got to dance a dizzy, mirrored pantomime in which they pretended to knock heads, and which ended with Nikoleta on Malanya’s shoulders. And meanwhile Nikoleta sat in on Heike’s rehearsals and learned her part, blocking the steps from a few feet behind her. 

In the past Mme. Rosenfeld had provided piano accompaniment during rehearsal, as slowly as was needed while the dancers warmed to the steps. But today there was a new pianist, called Lavrenti, an improbable Georgian like the Impresario. As the rehearsal period progressed and they saw more of each other, Nikoleta and Malanya, who each had reputable suitors (a magazine editor named Yevgeny and an academician named Valery, respectively) acquired a shared, rather unsavory suitor in Lavrenti. He seemed to favor the two of them equally: he’d wait in the wings for Malanya to snap the straps of her leotards, and for Nikoleta in order to catch her by the wrists as she leapt offstage. “Here we are again,” he’d greet her. Neither girl minded, not strongly. Malanya would accept attention from all comers, and Nikoleta had her great love, to whom she was loyal. With the others—Misha, the big doe-eyed tuba player in the pit orchestra, for instance—she was simply passing time. If she and Malanya hadn’t been ballerinas they would certainly be courtesans, Lavrenti said. “And it may yet be in the cards for Malanya.”

Soon enough, Nikoleta and the others learned what had become of Mme. Rosenfeld. The Impresario made a formal announcement one morning: Mmes. Radomyslskaya and Rosenfeld had been caught embezzling from the theatre. The Impresario would not turn them over to the authorities, although the thieves continued, brazenly, to insist on their own innocence. Rather the women would meet with the company’s trustees, that night, and be tried. The day after the trial, the Impresario announced that Rosenfeld and Radomyslskaya, found guilty, had accordingly left the company. The dancers’ thoughts returned again to the show.

Before rehearsal Nikoleta sat in the orchestra pit, which smelled like the terebinth rosin the musicians rubbed into their horsehair bows, sewing herself into her pointe shoes. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed the Impresario as he entered the theatre proper and walked down the central aisle. Amazingly, he failed to stray from his course and descended into the pit to join her. “You’re here early, Nikoleta Ivanovna,” he remarked.

“I do always try to be,” she said modestly, not daring to meet his gaze, but afraid to return to her sewing, her hands were shaking so. She was almost always in the theatre an hour before anyone else arrived, because she slept above it and because rehearsal excited her.

“Nikoleta, do you remember what I said after I read the cast list, a week ago?”

“Oh, yes. Yes. Corruption.” She searched her memory. “Looking plain when not made up.”

“Well, I’m afraid we’ve no hope of solving the problem of plainness, but the corruption is what I wanted to ask you about,” the Impresario said, amused. “Because you are so well-liked, Nikoleta, you can easily go among the girls and enquire after...wickednesses. Do you understand? I’d like for you to bring me the names of dancers who abuse their freedoms.”

“Yes,” Nikoleta said gravely. “This is a great privilege, sir.”

“No need to call me ‘sir,’ dear. And on the contrary, you’re doing _me_ a great service,” said the Impresario.

“Well, I believe in the cause,” Nikoleta said, truthfully. 

“If you should hear something you think I ought to know, stop into my office. Anytime.”

“Yes.”

Unused to keeping secrets, Nikoleta told Malanya about this conversation before she could think to wonder whether she shouldn’t. She took her new duty very seriously, and watched her fellow dancers carefully. A wickedness discovered would be reason for her to speak with the Impresario again, alone. So when she overheard a principal remark that parts of the score sounded remarkably like Mme. Rosenfeld’s original arrangements, and the choreography like Mme. Radomyslskaya’s, she wrote it down immediately. And it was lucky she did, for the Impresario wasn’t in his office. She slipped it under his door, and he thanked her for it the next time he saw her. A close watch would be kept over the girls she’d heard. The Impresario gave her a ring of keys to every room in the theatre, through which she could come and go as she liked. 

One day, in a chest of drawers in the Mssr. Bronstein’s old office, which was still unoccupied (since Malanya, who’d taken over his duties, operated out of their dormer), Nikoleta found a manila folder containing a set of correspondences. Mssr. Bronstein had confessed his love for Mlle. Kostrikova, who’d rejected him resolutely—Nikoleta clenched her fist as she read—but Bronstein had been persistent. There were five of his letters to Kostrikova dated after her rejection. And then there was a letter from Mmes. Radomyslskaya and Rosenfeld thanking Bronstein for the payment, received, and assuring him he’d have no trouble _accessing_ Kostrikova. Nikoleta, after she’d figured out what had happened, shook with indignation on Kostrikova’s behalf and at the cravenness of the women from whom she’d taken lessons not long before, even as in her heart she felt excited to be the one to expose their depravity. When she showed the Impresario, he told her that she should present it to the company herself. She decided to test it out on the corps before she approached the principals, who had been closer with the two evildoers and the victim. But somehow word got out and a few principals showed up to her briefing.

“And to think,” breathed blonde, red-faced Clementine, when the evidence had been set out. “He would’ve pulled it off if he hadn’t kept all his correspondence!”

“Cheap melodrama, eh?” said Anastasia. “Sometimes life’s more ballet than ballet is.”

“This is serious,” said Nikoleta sharply.

“May I have a look at that?” asked Heike.

“Why? I mean, yes, of course.” Nikoleta handed it to her, deferentially.

Heike looked it over. “Can you ask Malanya to run off a copy of this for me?”

“Yes. Why?”

Heike looked up at her, as if seeing her for the first time. “Because I can’t believe I missed something like this.”

When Nikoleta next saw Malanya, she asked about the copy and also whether Heike might not be an informant for the Impresario as well.

“What makes you say that?”

“Well, she made it seem like she was on the lookout for...malfeasance, like I am.”

“I’m sure she’s just interested in Mlle. Kostrikova,” said Malanya. “They did share a stage.”

> _“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice._
> 
> _“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”_

The next morning they were called together unexpectedly for another announcement: The Impresario’s wife had passed away. He thanked them for their condolences, and assured them that rehearsals would proceed as planned. The Princess of Spades would be portrayed, in a bold stroke, by a now-elderly former prima ballerina of the company, Mme. Ulyanova. In her old age she’d suffered several attacks of the nerves and was confined to a wheelchair. Only the right side of her face moved.

“This production is taking on an element of the grotesque,” said Anastasia, a slight girl with a heavy brow. The corps and a few principals were lined up with one foot each on the long makeup table in the dressing room, lacing their shoes.

“I think it’s nice that the Impresario’s including her,” Nikoleta said. “After all he’s done for her already! Taken over the company, and fed and housed her, asking nothing in return.”

“I shouldn’t think he would, as she’s practically a vegetable.”

“’S no use, Anasya, Nikoleta won’t hear a word against him.”

“You don’t know what she was like, you all, you weren’t with the company when she ran it,” quiet Slava said suddenly. Slava was technically Nikoleta’s love-rival for the Impresario, though in Nikoleta’s estimation she stood no chance at all with him. “You don’t understand how she was,” she continued. “She beat us with willow boughs.”

“Well, she should have no trouble with the baby, I guess.”

“I think that’s probably beneficial, the willow branches.” Nikoleta said. A few of the girls looked at her funny. “What?” She’d heard that the monks of old wore hair-shirts to ward off immoral urges.

“I have to remember to keep my conversations with you brief, Nikoleta,” said Anastasia. “When they go on long enough one always comes away with something like that.”

As the pack left the dressing room, the conversation turned to the Impresario’s late wife. 

“She was only a little older than us; I wonder how it was she went?”

“Don’t pry,” Nikoleta admonished.

“I was speculating, is all,” said Anastasia.

“I just feel _so_ sorry for him,” Malanya said, raising her eyes to the ceiling piously.

“Ya, what a string of bad luck!” said Clementine.

“If I went in for conspiracies, I’d wonder whether there wasn’t a uniting thread,” said Anastasia. “But I’ve a naturally uncurious mind,” she added, upon receiving a sharp look from Nikoleta. “Ah, speak of the—ehm, speaking of, that is.”

“Places for the Queen’s court,” said the Impresario. “Slava, run them through the croquet game. Nikoleta Ivanovna, come with me?” He motioned for her to follow him up the aisle to his office, which she did with wide eyes. “I want your opinion of something,” he said as he shut the door behind them. 

“Yes, sir,” Nikoleta breathed, disbelievingly.

“In confidence, Nikoleta—”

“Yes, sir?”

“In confidence I don’t think Heike is right for the role of Sonya.”

“No?”

“No, Sonya should be very small and lovely, and pure. A girl like you, Nikoleta.” 

“A girl like I,” Nikoleta croaked.

“Heike is technically competent, but she has no curiosity, which is essential.”

“I was going to play—Malanya and I were going to play Tweedledee and Tweedledum,” Nikoleta protested weakly, only out of modesty and obligation to her friend. Her breath was coming so hard now that she was sure the expansion and contraction of her ribcage, like a hearth bellow, must have been visible to the Impresario.

“At the rate she’s going your Malanya will be able to play both of them. No, we’ll get the Ukrainian. You will be my Sonya.”

“I—I’m not lovely. I don’t have nice teeth.” She grimaced, shyly, to demonstrate this.

The Impresario smiled, displaying his own yellow teeth. “You are perfect, Nikoleta. You have the generosity of imagination that the role requires. But I need your help with something.”

“Anything,” she whispered, though she really wasn’t certain of what this entailed.

“Now, Heike has a cabal among the principals—you know this, she has her cohort. And they’d be upset with me if I removed her. You understand that I need their complete trust and cooperation, and they’re fickle creatures. Not like you. But if we were to engineer an accident, a very minor one, of course…perhaps the sodium? You have the grace required.”

She didn’t understand, but she nodded. Though she didn’t blink a wash of tears passed over her eyes. The flat line of her mouth formed oxbows and doglegs as it contorted into a broad smile. She wanted, more than anything she’d ever wanted, to be held in the Impresario’s esteem, cradled in it.

“Good girl,” he said. “When you think of something, don’t tell me. Just proceed as you see fit.” 

> _DRINK ME._

Nikoleta went out and took lunch, thought it over, and afterward bought a phial of calomel, a cathartic, at the druggist’s. At dinner, which the company took together at a long table, she poured half of the white powder into her own tea and planted the rest in a pocket of Heike’s fur coat in the cloakroom. Near the end of the meal she was wracked with a coughing fit, sniffed her tea in its demitasse, and began shrieking and pointing. A fuss was made; the mercurous calomel in its vessel was recovered. _Why_ Heike might poison her understudy went unremarked-upon. Nikoleta was carried on her back up the spiral staircase to the level of the second balcony and her room. She didn’t have to act, of course: tremors ran up and down her sides, under the skin. She convulsed, she clawed involuntarily at her neck until a few of the girls carrying her held her arms to keep her from it. When laid in her bed she saw in the mirror across the room that her face had turned a febrile red.

“You only had to, to malinger!” Malanya exclaimed in dismay, wringing her hands, after everyone else had filtered out of their room and Nikoleta had explained the situation to her. “You didn’t actually have to poison yourself! You could’ve _faked_ sick and blamed her.”

“But that would’ve been lying,” Nikoleta reasoned, before she was overtaken by another coughing fit. “Bring the washbasin here, Melanie, please.”

So it came to pass that Nikoleta Ivanovna was outfitted in a bodice and skirt of something that, like white mica, fairly sparkled when she twirled. Heike was removed from the role of Sonya but not from the company. The Impresario drew her into his confidence behind a curtain and cut her a break, explaining that he believed her, he believed that she was innocent, but his hand was forced by public opinion. It simply would not do to keep her on as the heroine of the ballet, with what she had been accused of. But he was too soft-hearted to dismiss her. So she was given the part of the Knave of Hearts, a more suitable masculine role, really, in view of her looks. The next Monday she was discovered hanging behind a curtain from the batten, a cordon of flywire looped around her neck in a neat noose. The Impresario related the events leading to her suicide to the company. It couldn’t be said that her circumstances invoked much sympathy. All were glad to see hard-working, deserving Nikoleta take her place.

Nikoleta stepped into Heike’s role easily, with the Impresario’s assistance. He altered Heike’s choreography to suit someone of Nikoleta’s size and relative inexperience. It was the passion that she was capable of conveying, rather than technique, that mattered, the Impresario told her. The role, anyway, consisted mostly of allowing other dancers to lead her. When Sonya fell down the rabbithole, for instance, Nikoleta was lifted by a ballerina clothed all in black, and had only to mime falling through space, and then drowning in her own tears. Sonya’s scenes with the Cheshire Cat posed a problem at first: Nikoleta was too frightened by the creature’s glowing jack-o-lantern face, thrice her size, to deliver her lines. The Impresario agreed, for this reason, to voice it. He alone could reassure her. This was in keeping with their roles, Nikoleta thought. The cat was Sonya’s only true ally in the Kingdom of Wonder, her guide. And what guided Nikoleta was the feeling of the Impresario’s eyes on her, when she was onstage and he watched from the audience.

When offstage herself, Nikoleta acted as an informant on the principals, and under her critical eye their ranks dwindled. Nikoleta routed out dancers who had men over, who had once danced in other companies and so were liable to reveal private doings of the theatre to the public, and who displayed poor manners. For difficult cases, the Impresario gave her the name of a chemist at the drugstore around the block and wrote down an order for her to give him. The chemist read it and frowned sympathetically at Nikoleta. “I have rats, too,” he said, and pulled a tin from the shelf behind his counter. Inside were sachets that resembled teabags but which were full of a white powder. Nikoleta asked the Impresario what it was.

“Cream of docility,” he told her. Nikoleta got the chance to test it when it became clear that Heike’s former roommate, Mlle. Slutskaya, wouldn’t shut up about the first Sonya’s death. Slutskaya didn’t see any reason why Heike should’ve killed herself. She smelled conspiracy. Because she wouldn’t let Nikoleta near her, Nikoleta asked Misha the tubaist to take Slutskaya to lunch under the pretense of hearing her out, and to shake a packet of the white powder into her salt. When Slutskaya returned to the theatre a week later, following an illness, she was docile as anything. She was too docile to go up on pointe, or to perform her steps correctly, but took happily to a new role as Bread-and-Butterfly in the parade of the Looking-Glass Insects.

An usher called Mikhail who locked the theatre at night was found to have been complicit in the Bronstein-Radomyslskaya-Rosenfeld-Kostrikova intrigue, and was given leave. Nikoleta and the Impresario decided not to announce this to the company as a whole, as Mikhail had been popular with the girls. Nikoleta’s duties were many, it was true, but she found herself more than capable. She was carried along by her passions for the show, for the Impresario, and for justice, in a para-religious fervor. Prosecution was made that much easier by the fact that there was no longer ever any question of penalty; immediate dismissal always seemed to fit the crime.

In this climate the younger members of the corps stepped up to fill roles vacated by former principals, and were double-cast, triple-cast. Malanya was promoted to White Queen, and Slava Scriabina to Red Queen, in addition to White Rabbit. Lazara, who was as active a denouncer of corruption in their ranks as Nikoleta, was made the Queen of Hearts. Andrea, Malanya’s bitter rival, became Humpty Dumpty, and sly Anastasia the Dormouse. The new class was on the rise. Malanya supervised recastings—some roles had at this point been held by three different dancers—and Slava began to lead rehearsals in the Impresario’s stead, when he was busy.

The Impresario gifted Nikoleta a music-box for her troubles, with a little ball-jointed wooden ballerina inside. It was such a child’s thing that Nikoleta wondered whether the Impresario had bought it originally for one of his children, but she dismissed this thought. She sat up in bed watching the figurine revolve to a tinny quodlibet of popular music. With each revolution the music-box, the Impresario’s gift to her, acquired greater significance. It was a promise, she felt sure: Nikoleta would be his Odette, his Giselle, his Columbine. 

“Would you shut that up, please?” asked Malanya. She was hanging in their wardrobe a fur coat and a cheongsam that Lavrenti had bought her, and wearing a pair of funny starched white pyjamas, also a gift from the pianist.

“Where does he get the money?” Nikoleta wondered, jealous in spite of herself of Lavrenti’s obvious preference for Malanya, though she was sure it was predicated on Malanya’s connections within the company. She had a way of making herself indispensable, which is what the pianist seemed to want to be. 

But Nikoleta wasn’t jealous long. Her gifts from the Impresario were better: cobweb-thin stockings, a lipstick the color of meadwine. And fine liquor, all she could drink. The Impresario bought Nikoleta, also, or rented for her, a flat a block from the theatre. She packed her dresses, walked to the building, and arrived in her new furnished rooms still uncertain as to whether she’d been made the Impresario’s mistress or not. When she opened her valise, she found that her bottle of perfume had broken and soaked all of her clothes. Nikoleta sighed and went into the bathroom. She ran cold water into her new copper bathtub, with the intention of washing the clothes, only, but watching it stream from the gleaming faucet she decided to bathe. So she shivered in cold water that reached her ribs—this felt right somehow. When she’d gotten out, she walked into the middle of the parlor and stood, naked and wet, dripping water onto the bare floorboards. Thinking of those monks and their hairshirts, Nikoleta opened each of the windows in the room and let the winter air rush in. She walked slowly to her new bedroom and drew open the wardrobe to find it stocked with dresses. She selected a slip as thin as a ginkgo leaf, hoping she’d be able to feel the draughts through it, and went and stood in the open air again. Nikoleta lifted one heel to the knee of her grounded leg and massaged the sole of her foot, missing Malanya, wishing the Impresario would come soon, if she was to be his mistress after all. She’d never slept alone before. But the Impresario didn’t come up that night, nor any other, though Nikoleta began hosting her own parties in hopes of attracting him. She was inducted into a higher echelon of society, carrying Malanya with her. Lavrenti toasted their ascension.

> _Fury said to a mouse, that he met in the house, “Let us both go to law: I will prosecute you.—”_
> 
> _“I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury,” said cunning old Fury; “I’ll try the whole case, and condemn you to death.”_

When laying in her four-postered bed, waiting for the spoonful of sleep-aide she’d imbibed to take effect, Nikoleta interrogated the probity of everyone she knew. She went over conversations she’d had weeks prior. The Mouse that Sonya met in the ocean of tears, little Nikolina, who fancied herself musically-minded, had mentioned to Nikoleta once, offhand, that she heard in the Impresario’s original score snatches of music from other ballets. Here was a passage from Massenet, there a shard of Saint-Saëns, and the White Knight’s pas de deux was cribbed whole from Delibes. It had been a casual observation, or it had seemed to be at the time. But the comment took on a more sinister cast in Nikoleta’s half-awake remembrance. It wasn’t an original composition, Nikolina had said. Nikoleta hadn’t an ear for music, but she knew that this couldn’t be so. She was, now, infuriated on the Impresario’s behalf by Nikolina’s slander, and went straightaway to him with it the following morning. She recommended dismissal, sight unseen, but the sentimental Impresario thought Nikolina ought to be tried.

“She thinks she knows better than you!” Nikoleta exclaimed.

“It may be a misunderstanding. She might not mean any harm by it. The times we’ve had,” he mused. Nikolina had been with him an awfully long while. “Even if it’d be _just_ —”

“And it would be.”

“—I couldn’t find it in myself. You don’t know the toll this has taken on me, Nikoleta, uncovering all this subterfuge.”

“And me, too, sir. I do know.”

“It seems every day there’s a new evil brought me.”

“That reminds me, sir,” said Nikoleta, remembering something else. “Glebochka, the typesetter, _she_ told me she thought the book _Sonya_ ’s based on was written by an Englishman. And only translated into Russian.”

“Ridiculous. And yet a serious accusation,” he said, itching his chin with the butt of his pipe. “But then Glebochka is a funny, dreamy, spiritual sort of girl.” The Impresario knew every dancer in the company by name. “It might have come to her in a dream, or she might be speaking in metaphor.” The Impresario thought the best of everyone. This was another reason Nikoleta loved him. But she made sure both of his libelers were found guilty, when tried by Dusenka, the stern principal who they’d found to be a fair arbiter of these matters. Nikoleta had Malanya type up her conversations with Nikolina and Glebochka, as she remembered them, and these were produced at the trial. They were dismissed, along with Mlles. Rykova, Krestinskaya, and Stancheva. Mlles. Pyatakova and Radeka were spies for rival theatres. Heike was found guilty posthumously. The whole process was carried out within the week. Nikoleta took comfort in the fact that each successive investigation she started in on seemed to be resolved faster than the last. 

As a result of Nikoleta’s sedulity, though, the whole much-diminished company and by needs much of the crew was made up as playing cards for the Queen’s croquet-ground and for the kangaroo court, even Lavrenti, who was replaced as accompanist by a player piano for the court interlude. He became the Knave of Clubs, the same suit as Melanie (a lowly Three). As cards, both wore sandwich boards over their shoulders. The costumes were uniformly ornate, as the Impresario had spared no expense. For the Queen’s croquet, they used real live hedgehogs and real taxidermied flamingoes. They were instructed to be gentle with both, after Clementine snapped the thin neck of a flamingo. The bird’s head came clean off, rolled across the stage leaving dust in its wake, and landed at Nikoleta’s slippered feet.

> _“It’s getting as dark as it can.”_
> 
> _“And darker.”_

As they drew closer to opening night, there was a sense of narrowing, of closing in. Against advice given her by the Impresario’s chemist, Nikoleta smoked more than ever and ate very little, superstitiously, afraid of breaking some spell that held her together with an excess of any one constituent. What few things she did eat were confections, pretty things, edible bibelots: foil-wrapped chocolate oranges, dry flowers encased in clear spun sugar. Then there was the laundry. Nikoleta had always done her own washing, if she left an article of clothing on the floor of her apartment it would be washed and folded in a basket at her door the day after. This meant there was a washerwoman who came into her flat at night to collect the clothes. And Nikoleta locked her door, so this person had a key. She found it difficult to sleep, so the Impresario’s chemist prescribed her a jarred jellyish decoction to keep on her bedside table.

During a dress rehearsal, on a break between acts, Nikoleta sat on a balcony smoking and dangling her bare feet over the street below to air out her blisters. She heard the door to the balcony open and shut behind her, and half-turned to find Lavrenti leaning against the jamb. 

“I like you best like this,” he said. “In your natural state. I’ve brought you something.” He tossed her a box of rolling papers. “Licorice-tasting,” he said. “You’ll like them.”

“What’re these for?” she asked, suspicious. He hadn’t paid her any mind for weeks.

“Cigarettes,” he said without parting the top row of his teeth from the bottom.

“I _mean_ why are you giving them to me?”

“No reason,” he said. “A whim.”

“You don’t _go_ with me,” she said. “You go with Malanya. She turns your pages in rehearsal.”

“A cat may look at a king,” Lavrenti said.

“What’s that mean?”

“As much as those do. Try one.”

“I don’t have tobacco on me for rolling,” she said. “You want something, I can tell.”

“You read too much into goodwill gestures,” he said, failing to hide his disdain. He drew in a breath through his nose, his teeth still clenched. “I’m just generous. Ah, while I’m here, you might be interested to know that that fat tuba player you screwed has left us for a different company.”

“Since when do you keep track of hirings and firings?”

“You aren’t the only one your Impresario delegates to.”

“You’re jealous,” Nikoleta realized.

“Of Misha? Hardly.”

“No, of me and the Impresario.”

“You’ve no idea how well the Impresario and I are acquainted, you humorless, blackhearted little zealotess,” Lavrenti spat, losing his composure entirely. “And I was trying to make nice! Christ! It’s no use putting on airs, I know where you came from. He pulled you from the gutter. You came to the theatre on a garbage scow.” This wasn’t strictly true. After the Impresario had offered her a place in the corps, Nikoleta had bought her passage downriver on a coal barge. Through the slats of the box she crouched in, she saw the steam floating up off of the bergs of snow at the river’s banks, sublimating. He’d seen her dancing a lezginka in ethnic costume (not her own, mind) and told her she had _dynamism_. He’d recognized talent and devotion; it was nothing to be ashamed of. “Stop staring like a...a staked martyr, it doesn’t work on me,” Lavrenti said, his lip curling. “I can’t stand to look at you.”

“I could say the same,” Nikoleta retorted. He’d never loved, Lavrenti. He acted proud of his faithlessness, he swaggered. He disgusted her, but they _did_ look at each other. They saw each other clearly, Nikoleta thought, for a brief instant. Then Lavrenti looked at his watch and saw that their ten minutes were up. When he’d left her alone, Nikoleta sniffed at the rolling papers. The scent of aniseed concealed any more sinister odor. She considered licking a sheet in order to test for poisons, but decided against it. The Impresario would hear about this: the sudden hostility, Lavrenti’s absurd claim to familiarity with him. But when Nikoleta marched to his office, she found him out, his door locked. She wrote a note and slipped it with the box under the door. When she brought it up the next day with the Impresario, he assured her that the papers weren’t poisoned, that Lavrenti didn’t mean her any harm. He was hung up on her, and expressed this in a funny way.

> _“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”_
> 
> _“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”_
> 
> _“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”_

On opening night Nikoleta sat in the dressing-room, pruning the bouquets that lined her place at the makeup mirror. She’d moved from Yevgeny’s red roses to delicate pink chrysanthemums from Lavrenti. She hadn’t seen him since they’d argued on the balcony, but he’d left an apology note with the bouquet. A little childish, Nikoleta thought, his effort at making-up, and the flowers were amateurly arranged. She lopped each stalk so the blooms stood in their vase at the same height, and then removed the deadheads. Between bouquets she’d select a bottle of perfume—she’d been given quite a lot of these by the Impresario’s friends—at random, without looking at its label, and, smelling it, would guess its scent. She’d check her guess: wrong. She took a drink from the flask of vodka she kept in a hatcase, then chose a new bottle and guessed again. Wrong. Another drink. She really had no nose for these things. Nikoleta looked at the time and saw that the curtain would go up soon. If the performance was imminent, where were the other dancers? She rose and went to the door. “Lavrenti?” she called into the hall. She was startled by the hoarseness of her voice. “Lavrenti? Someone? Can someone put on a pot of coffee?”

She returned to her seat, mixed water into her powder makeup and slathered it on, and when it had half-dried rubbed rouge into her cheeks, violently. She tried to draw her lips on and found that her hands were shaking too hard to manage the pencil. Nikoleta walked haltingly out into the wings of the stage (her legs had fallen asleep) and saw that the curtains were drawn to the side and the audience unpeopled. It was the night before the opening. She was the only one in the theatre; even Malanya was staying with Lavrenti for the night. Nikoleta sighed with relief.

Then she smelled something funny. It was an odor like the bottled ambergris she’d failed to recognize in the dressing room. Nearly like. A drop of foul-smelling liquid landed on her brow, so Nikoleta looked up. Imperceptibly far above her, two black things dangled from the catwalk. Her first thought was that one of the more peasantish corps girls, Nikitochka maybe, had hung meat there to cure. Nikoleta liked the Ukrainian, but this would be an offense punishable by expulsion from the corps, and she would have to bring it to the Impresario. The Impresario had been waiting for an opportunity to lance coarse elements from the company. Nikoleta ran up the spiral staircase that led to the balcony and box seats, falling on her hands in her haste. When she reached the level of the catwalk, she saw that the hanging objects weren’t hams. And then she descended the way she’d come, and stumbled up the aisle, off-balance still, behind the box office to the Impresario’s study. The door was open a hair, so she entered as she called “Sir?”

“Yes?” The Impresario was at his desk, sketching something: costume designs, or sets. He didn’t look up.

“I found Mmes. Radomyslskaya and Rosenfeld,” Nikoleta whispered.

“What do you mean you found them, Nikoleta?”

“They’re hams, I mean they’re hanging. Their corpses. They hanged themselves, or each other. Like Heike.”

“What are you talking about? They fled the country.”

“They didn’t! They—come see!”

The Impresario allowed Nikoleta to lead him out onto the stage—by the hand, which she thrilled at—where she pointed up toward the flyspace, at the soles of the womens’ shoes, where they punctuated the darkness like stars in the aether. He peered up, following her finger. “Ah.” He looked down at her. “You’re right. Regret, I suppose. In a way it’s tragic.”

Something occurred to Nikoleta. “But why would they return to the theatre?”

“The scene of their crime?” the Impresario suggested.

“They looked decayed, the corpses.”

“Hm? What are you trying to tell me, Nikoleta?” he asked. “Oh. Oh, I see now. My, you’ve done a very naughty thing.”

“What?”

“You’ve killed them on my behalf, and tried to pass it off as a double-suicide so I wouldn’t be party to it.”

“What? No, I didn’t!”

“Of course you did. Just like Heike. Always the same method. Don’t worry, dear, I won’t tell a soul. I know you’ve done these things for love of the company.”

“I didn’t,” she said.

“Oh?”

“I mean I didn’t do it.” Here Nikoleta began to question whether she hadn’t, indeed. “I do love the company.”

“Then why wouldn’t you? We’re better off without them, of course.”

“They deserved it.”

“And it wouldn’t have been right for them to walk the streets, slandering us.”

“Uh-uh. But I didn’t.”

“I’ll overlook it,” he said. 

“I didn’t kill them.”

“Of course not,” he said indulgently. “Nikoleta, why’ve you your face on?”

She reached up and touched her chin, encountering the still-tacky stage makeup, which she’d forgotten she was wearing. “I was practicing for tomorrow.”

“I hope tomorrow you’ll add your lips and eyes.”

“I will.”

“Would you mind taking care of the bodies? Sharp of you, to think to string them up like that, but I think we should spare the others the shock, for the opening.”

“I think I’m too small,” said Nikoleta. “To carry them.”

“Nonsense. You got them up there, didn’t you? Bringing them down should be easier.”

“Right.” This made sense, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember how she’d managed in the first place.

“What do I smell on you, Nikoleta?”

The alcohol. “I was trying perfumes,” she said.

“My little Pierrot,” said the Impresario, indicating her painted face. He returned to his office and Nikoleta, seeing no other way of going about it, cut the ropes by which the women were hanging and consequently had to double back, after dragging each of them to the boiler-room, to mop the splatter from the stage. All of this she did slowly, sobering by degrees, but she felt clear-headed enough by the time she folded Mme. Radomyslskaya and stuffed her into the incinerator. The smell worsened instantly. She retreated to her dressing-room to take refuge from it until the crematory process was complete and she could attend to Mme. Rosenfeld. Nikoleta applied a lime scent on the insides of her wrists. She noticed her face in the mirror, between sprays of flowers, and saw that she looked a fright: her hair out of sorts, her tights laddered with runs, streams of white facepaint all down her neck and dress from the sweat-heat of the boiler room. She watched herself rub her wrists together with her fists upheld in the manner of a shackled penitent, and gave her reflection a smile. Lavrenti, she thought with satisfaction, would never know what it was to drag a body down a long, dark hall, panting, but _happily_ , despite knowing all the while that the person for whom you were doing it would be unsatisfied with the results of your labors. And he was, rightly. All the night and the next day, the theatre was filled with the stench of seared flesh, which had been carried in pipes all through the building. “Something crawled into the furnace and died,” the Impresario explained to the company. He didn’t throw Nikoleta a wink; his expression didn’t change as his gaze passed over her.

Nikoleta took a salt for her headache and felt reasonably well after she’d warmed up with the rest of the company. Half-deaf Andreyeva, the Mad Hatter, missed a few musical cues but Nikoleta was able to salvage the scene. She was whisked this way and that without issue by Slava and Malanya as the two Looking-Glass Queens. Clementine the White Knight fell successfully on her face, probably owing to experience. The audience laughed, however, when it wasn’t supposed to, and nearly half of it failed to return after intermission. Upon seeing this Nikoleta was overcome with a nausea that would only be relieved, momentarily, in the second act’s final scene, when she was crowned Queen Sonya and a long fritillary train added to her skirt. She was too upset to greet the balletomanes, afterward. There mightn’t have been any. She retreated to the greenroom rather than know for certain there weren’t.

Malanya read reviews of their production of _Sonya_ obsessively, as they were published in newspapers, while sitting beside Nikoleta in the dressing room. “They think we rely too heavily on special effects...that there’s no artistry in our dancing, no craft. And the quality of our technique has declined immeasurably since our last production.”

“You don’t believe that, do you?”

“Well, no, of course not. Don’t be silly. I’m just relating it.”

Nikoleta grabbed the newspaper from her and skimmed the review herself. “The corps moves as if lobotomized, and the title role is held by a midget.” 

“Well, they said _I_ resembled a charwoman, if that’s any comfort.”

“Can I sleep here tonight?” Nikoleta asked, not wanting to leave the theatre. 

“Um.” Malanya fidgeted.

“Lavrenti?”

“Yes.”

“You and he can have my apartment,” Nikoleta decided. “And I’ll sleep in our old room. Yes?”

“Thank you,” said Malanya, and then embraced her and held the embrace much longer than a simple show of gratitude demanded.

“Er, something’s poking me,” Nikoleta began.

Malanya drew back, sniffing, and handed her the culprit, the key to their old shared room.

“Oh, I still have mine.”

“The Impresario changed the locks,” said Malanya. “I don’t...know why.” She looked on the verge of tears for some reason.

“Just to the room, or all of them?”

“All of them.”

“He didn’t tell me.” Nikoleta felt for her keyring in her coat, draped over the back of her chair.

“It must have slipped his mind,” Malanya said, and hugged her again.

When Nikoleta went up to the room that night she found it full of Malanya’s printing supplies. Reams of paper and spare programs were stacked floor to ceiling. The room itself was meaner than she’d remembered it. The plaster was cracked, and the radiator clicked like a deathwatch beetle while the dry air and Nikoleta in it seemed to grow no warmer. She had to take two spoonfuls of her laudanum. Even so, she woke before morning, and to lull herself back to sleep she paged through a program from the pile in the corner. She couldn’t find her own name in it. Nikoleta supposed it was a printing mistake. This was why the programs were in Malanya’s room, instead of the box office.

The next day the Impresario announced that Bronstein had bribed the newspapers to slander them. The corps cheered. The Impresario took a collection in an alms-box to pay for ads to counteract the false reviews. Nikoleta felt cosseted, insulated from the outside world, in the dark, velvety music-box of the theatre. She loved her peers, who had risen with her into the ranks of the principals. She loved the Impresario, of course, though he hadn’t spoken to her since the discovery of Mmes. Radomyslskaya and Rosenfeld. She felt confident that there would be no more intriguing. A rumor that the show’s run would be truncated began to circulate, but was soon quashed by the Impresario. He was, in fact, considering extending it. Sometimes a fact could, with repetition, be turned fully ’round. The show continued to draw only small audiences, but Nikoleta grew accustomed to that. What they were doing was radical. Its scope would not be appreciated in its time, but afterward.

Nikoleta was onstage for the duration of the play; only during the intermission did she step into the wings. She kept her eyes on the set, walking backward, and clapping silently herself for the Queen of Hearts’ court as they took their bows. On this, what would be her ninth show, her heel came into contact with something on the floor. In the corner of her eye, Nikoleta saw the blue flare of a phosphor match. But just as soon as she’d noticed it, it was snuffed out. “Who’s there?” she asked, her nose full of strange-smelling smoke. She didn’t notice the cordon of piano wire until it had fallen around her neck, and by then it’d been pulled taut. “Here we are again,” said an accented voice.

> _“Oh, you wicked wicked little thing!” cried Alice, catching up the kitten, and giving it a little kiss to make it understand that it was in disgrace._

She was lifted, easily, as if he’d been practicing, and carried by her noose farther back into the dark stage right wing. “Run your course, I should say, you guilty baggage,” said her hangman. “I’m to put you up over a beam. Like Heike, hm? A nice touch, on his part. Let’s have a look at you: oh, funny shade of violet, that. Goodnight, my dear. You’ve served your purpose admirably. And now you’ll shoulder the blame for this scandal we’re up to our ankles in, and for the theatre. Oh yes, I’m to burn it. Or you are, officially. You, the powdered sodium, resent for the run’s failure. He wants a new start. He does like _new_ things.”

> _Which dreamed it?_

Funnily, if Nikoleta died then, then Nikolai Ivanovich, in her place, still clung to life. It was his life she’d lived, after all. As purgative fire tore through the theatre, he found himself somehow in the Impresario’s box seat, on his belly at the Impresario’s feet. Nikolai Ivanovich wound around the Impresario’s legs gratefully, and the Impresario petted his shaved head.

“Koba, Koba,” he panted. “It was all real, wan’t it?” The motives, he meant, and the crimes.

“Ah, my Kolya. What am I going to do with you?”

The Impresario didn’t seem to mind his chipped and missing teeth, his blue bloated tongue. Maybe he couldn’t make them out, in the dark. But Nikolai saw every detail of the Impresario’s face, hanging in the chiaroscuro blackness, as if illumined from within: his whiskers, the yellow smile that appeared and then disappeared under the whiskers, his smiling yellow eyes, and then nothing, as the Impresario painted over Nikolai’s own eyes and the rest of his face—lovingly, lovingly—with pitch, with perdition, vanishing him into the backdrop.


End file.
